The lap dogs of luxury at UMass

You can spend an entire career in journalism, graduating from selectmen’s meetings to congressional hearings to federal corruption trials, and never wander into anything half as good as the last eight minutes of the University of Massachusetts trustees meeting earlier this week.

A group who make up what is called the compensation committee gathered to decide whether it seemed excessive to give recently departed UMass president Jack Wilson a fully paid yearlong sabbatical at his $425,000 base salary. After that, they were to determine whether his pay as a professor should be really high or incomprehensively high.